Saturday, March 29, 2014

Aotearoa: Mana, a Movement for Reform or Revolution?

The NACT regime is fearful of both Mana
and the new Dotcom party so they are spinning a campaign to smear both as they
talk about an alliance to get over the 5% electoral threshold.Well the NACTs would know all about the 5%
threshold. But is Mana selling out to a rich 'internet pirate' in danger of being
extradited to the US, or is there some logic to Mana doing a deal with Dotcom?

Background

Mana is not very left wing. It is
basically a Maori nationalist party with some populist elements linked to the
Australian Green Left and the Bolivarians in Latin America. Mana came out of
the Maori Party, itself a split from the Labour Party in opposition to the former
Labour government “Foreshore and Seabed Act" effectively confiscating Maori claims to rights to
the Foreshore and Seabed such as aquaculture and mining. But the Maori Party
was always committed to the emerging capitalist tribal, or iwi, leaders whose
interests were not those of the mass of Maori workers. They proved this by
joining in a coalition with the National Government alongside ACT and NZ
Future.

Harawira split from the Maori Party to form the Mana movement when it
proved incapable of standing up to its National Party partner to defend
ordinary Maori. It appeared that Hone Harawira had been trying to meet the
needs of poor and working class Maori as a Maori Party MP, and was obstructed
by the Maori party leadership because of their alliance with the capitalists.
The lesson should have been that an alliance with capitalists will not meet the
needs of working or poor. Has Mana taken that lesson on board?

Mana took those dissatisfied Maori party
members those who agreed that the Maori Party were betraying the needs of
working and poor Maori in government with National. Mana enlisted Unite union
official Matt McCarten as campaign manager and gained some union activist
support. Mana movement also attracted some working class activists and left
wing activists including some from Socialist Aotearoa (SA) and International
Socialists Organisation (ISO).

Mana’s policy reflects the diverse
membership – influenced by Maori nationalism and a popular practical
‘social welfare’ for the poor. “Feed the kids” has been one of Hone Harawira’s
more potent policies raised in parliament. However just as the Maori Party was
formed to defend the right of iwi to set up capitalist corporations to exploit
the Foreshore and Seabed, Mana’s policies for the poor are a compromise with
capitalism. They seek to patch up a problem within capitalism, rather than
overthrow the entire system. As such it is a movement for reform and not a
movement for revolution. Let’s see how
this works in practice.

Mana movement for reforms
not revolution

Housing - Mana participated in the fight against
privatisation of state housing areas in Glen Innes, Porirua and Hastings. It is
committed to state housing and has picketed and blocked trucks removing state
houses from Glen Innes. This is a good tactic but it is being used to push a
parliamentary strategy rather than building a working class movement on the
ground. Mana failed to build support in the community and in the unions against
the removals to not only picket but occupy these homes with working class
families that need the homes. Instead they used small groups of locals and
supporters in futile attempts to stop the removals.As a result Mana’s weakness and desperation
lead to individuals staging risky stunts and members being arrested – including
leaders such as John Minto and Hone Harawira. This has reduced housing activism
to no more than political diversions such as road trips to Wellington
(parliament) and letters to politicians. As a result the NACT regime has
successfully divided Maori into competing over a declining stock of houses with
Kaitaia Maori receiving relocated Glen Innes houses and Whakatane Maori
offering to buy up State houses for removal.

Workers struggles - Mana has had victories in some picket
line protests – shaming an Otara retailer into removing gambling machines, and
embarrassing the Auckland city council into exploring other options for an East
– West motorway from the airport (instead of through Mangere suburban housing
area). These are notable because they are based on the effective rallying
of working class communities which then have the potential to get politically
involved in a questioning and challenging Mana’s reformist strategy. Generally
however, Mana has only supported union pickets as followers not as leaders. Except
for those in Mana who are involved in the Unite! union they have not given
priority to campaigns for workers in struggle against the capitalist class.Similarly, the Auckland Action Against Poverty (AAAP),
founded by Mana co-Vice President Sue Bradford, a pressure group that is active
in campaigning for the poor, does not promote itself as recruiting the poor to
the unions, nor the Mana Party itself. The Mana movement is therefore
fragmented and aimed at local body and parliamentary politics rather than aimed
at building a united working class mass base capable of developing into a
revolutionary movement.

Against
Asset sales – Instead of
workers occupations of state assets against sales, Mana has played into the hands
of private capitalism by supporting the Maori Council legal fight (injunction)
against the sales (for Maori rights as capitalist rights). Power station
workers combined with working class communities could occupy these sites
together. However we would need to cut the power to the capitalist class to
stop the sales. And that would have raised the question of who has the power? –
a revolutionary working class; or a parasitic capitalist class. What is needed
is more direct action that mobilises the local working class communities in the
issues that matter. The weakness of organised working class movement
outside parliament cannot be overcome by being again and again diverted into
parliamentary dead-ends.

Parliamentary partners - Mana has agreed to talks with the
capitalist-aligned Maori Party (who props up this capitalist government – and
backs their anti-worker actions). The Maori Party are dedicated to being
at the capitalist table. In talks, they agreed to work together on common
programmes for the poor. This is further evidence of a non-revolutionary party:
A party committed to working with self-declared capitalists is in bed with the bosses. If Mana is
serious in fighting for the poor working class it needs to split the remaining
workers from the Maori Party leadership. This is also true for Labour and the
Greens? Now Matt McCarten is the “Chief of Staff” for Labour leader, David
Cunliffe, will he attract the working poor back to Labour? Where does that
leave Mana in relation to Labour?

Many on the left including the small
's' socialists who are active in Mana support
McCarten’s strategy for a left-coalition government in which the leftish
Greens and Mana will pull Labour to the left. But even at best this is an
Australian Green Left/Boliviarian reformist strategy of reviving social
democracy in the belief that capitalism can be reformed and ‘socialism’
legislated into existence.As we have
argued many times, a reborn social democracy today is looking to China as a ‘populist’
if not ‘socialist’ power capable of uniting all the oppressed nations of the
world in a bloc against the dominant power of the US and its allies.

NZ left in and around Mana

The International Socialists Organisation
(ISO), Socialist Aotearoa (SA), and Fightback, are tiny left organisations that
work inside or around Mana. They claim
to be ‘socialist’ but over many years they have participated in popular fronts
where they hook up with a layer of the capitalist class. While they promote worker activism, they are at
risk of betraying working class interests to the capitalists. This is what
happens internationally when these parties align themselves to the Green Left/
Bolivarian bloc with China which today is also an imperialist country
exploiting the masses on every continent.

Even if their support is ‘critical’ which
means that they do not endorse the complete program of Mana, and reserve the
right to criticise it, they end up effectively supporting the Mana program which is
fundamentally reformist and geared to give Maori a fair share of kiwi
capitalism. For example the asset sale campaign has become a shadow of the
campaign that it was. Instead of the working class getting mobilised in the
streets and occupying the assets, the struggle was demobilised. Now it’s only a
paper war, ticking the boxes. It has been diverted into parliament with the
petition and referendum begging for notice from the ruling class which of
course ignores it. The capitalists go right ahead with their sales agenda.

Mana’s reformist program shows that those
on the ‘left’ inside
Mana who object to alliances with Labour, Greens, of Dotcom because they
are ‘capitalist’, are sowing illusions in Mana as ‘revolutionary’. As we argue
in the section below on ‘Social Democracy and Revolution’, to build an
extra-parliamentary mass revolutionary party it is necessary to destroy all those parties
that drag workers into parliament on the promise to reform capitalism. Against
the ‘ultralefts’ we adopt Lenin’s
strategy of supporting such parties like a "rope supports a hanged man”.

Mana and Dotcom?

We can see that Mana stands for reforming
capitalism in alliances with political parties that have links to the
capitalist ruling class such as the Maori Party, the Greens, and the Labour
Party. This reformist strategy is based on building a parliamentary majority so
its first requirement must be getting enough votes to become the government.
That’s why Mana is talking to Kim Dotcom and the new Internet Party. There is
no doubt that Dotcom is a capitalist who made his millions with his internet
Megaupload and Mega businesses. But in order to stay in business Dotcom has to
fight the giant monopolies that dominate the internet and the media empires.
Both Dotcom and Mana have an interest in campaigning for internet freedom
against the media and other monopolies that control global wealth for the 1%
against the 99%.

So there is reformist logic in a
political agreement between Mana and Dotcom. It’s unlikely to be a formal
alliance but one in which common
policies are jointly defended. This could be a commitment to electoral
cooperation and /or to policy proposals around the internet, spying, rights of
minorities, etc. Such an agreement could easily be part of a wider left
coalition in Government. As revolutionaries our position is not to moralise
about who owns fast cars or fascist memorabilia, but to judge deals on whether or
not they advance the interest of workers.

Social Democracy and Revolution

In the last issue
of Class Struggle we spelled out our
position on the Labour Party as a capitalist party and the need to build a
Revolutionary Socialist Labour Party capable of leading a socialist revolution
in NZ that will smash the state and replace capitalist parliament with a
Workers State. We will not go over all the arguments again. What is important
here is that such a new RSLP will not arise out of thin air but out of those
who currently vote for existing parties of the left who become convinced that they are betraying the interests of
workers and who split to the left to build that new party.

Our attitude towards the McCarten strategy
of a left coalition is that it is necessary to give critical support to such a
coalition to put it in government so that it can be shown up as pro-capitalist
and anti-worker. But this can only work if a left coalition keeps left and
doesn’t include in it openly capitalist or openly racist and chauvinist parties like
NZ First. This is because the left becomes a hostage to the right to stay in
government so that the right can be blamed for broken promises to the workers. So
who would we give critical support to in such a left coalition?

The Greens are a 'cross class party' because while
largely based on the petty bourgeois or middle class, they are in some areas
more ‘left’ than Labour especially on the environment and global warming which
brings them up against monopoly capital. Labour itself is a divided party with
a capitalist program but a working class base. It too includes a large middle
class element. In short we would give critical support to a Labour/Green/Mana
coalition government where beyond confidence and supply agreements the parties
remain independent. Each party would then be judged on delivering on its own
promises and not who else they can blame for its failure to deliver. This would
allow workers to judge them on how they matched words and deeds, and prove that
parliament is a bosses’ talk shop and that workers need to build a mass
revolutionary party for socialism.

In the event that Mana makes a deal with the
Internet Party or any of the other reformist parties for the purposes of getting a left
coalition into government we would have no principled objection to such an
agreement. We would also consider giving critical support to the Internet Party
if its program advances the interests of the working class e.g., opposition to spying and the TPPA, and support for 'free' education' and 'free internet', which collide with the interests of global finance capital. A new revolutionary
party will not fall from the sky but arise out of the struggle of workers in
defence of basic democratic rights and social and economic security. That includes the majority working class
being able to vote for a government of their choice so that they learn that real democracy is impossible unless they
go all the way to the overthrow of the capitalist state and the creation of a
Workers and Oppressed Government. (See article on the ‘Spanish Marches March 22’
in Class Struggle, 108).

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red rave is the loud mouth of members of the Communist Workers' Group of Aotearoa/New Zealand, committed to building a new communist international to lead workers to the revolutionary overthrow of global capitalism. Until March 2010 a member of the Internationalist Leninist/Trotskyist Fraction (FLTI). Now in a Liaison Committee with the Communist Workers' Group (USA) and Revolutionary Workers' Group (Zimbabwe).